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We Need Chrome No More

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Re: We Need Chrome No More

#461

Post by mattnewport »

maple3142 wrote: post #441
mattnewport wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using DuckDuckGo and don't miss Google for search. It's mostly a solved problem for me at this point. Google Maps is harder to replace but there are workable though generally not as good alternatives. YouTube is the hardest Google property to escape for me.

I found that DuckDuckGo is still not competent enough for non-English users. The quality of its result in non-English language still worse than Google's ones.

I can believe that. English is my first language though and I find it works well for me with English searches.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#462

Post by fiddlerwoaroof »

bad_user wrote: post #393
Laforet wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The decision to revamp their extensions API also cost a lot of goodwill from the community. FF today may be faster and more secure than two years ago, but from my perspective it has permanently lost some of its utility and appeal.

As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it. Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place. To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not. Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s…

Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#463

Post by Wowfunhappy »

fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #462
bad_user wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a long time Firefox user I think the change in its extensions APIs is one of the greatest moves they did and I’m glad they did it. Chrome’s extensions were isolated, easy to develop and had a permissions system in place. To this day Firefox is still lagging behind in its isolation. For example Chrome can disable extensions in Incognito, but Firefox does not. Also if you’re not paying attention, Chrome won and it’s…

Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.

It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line?

Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions.

†I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#464

Post by crimsonalucard »

perlgeek wrote: post #25
mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. Curious, I remember speed being the primary reason. Google invented V8 (the javascript engine), with some pretty decent optimizations and a well-working JIT on i386/amd64 platforms. At the time when chromium came out, it handled some JS-heavy applications very nicely that Firefox struggled w…

I always thought it was the cool name and logo. Chrome sounds way more slick then internet explorer or firefox. Plus the logo for chrome was shiny.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#465

Post by millstone »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #397
guitarbill wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agreed to your comment before you edited it, simply because on a price point, Apple stuff isn't viable for laptops and desktops for many people. I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. Apple has shown with Safari that some people do like privacy features baked in, and while I can't say for sure, I hope it played a part in emboldening Firefox/Mozilla to focus a bit more on privacy.

> I don't agree with your weird rant, without any sources. We are in a thread about browsers and web standards. Do I really need to explain that Apple pushed h.264 on the web, ultimately forcing a binary blob on Firefox? The lagging on web standards is a common complaint among web developers.

Apple's Intelligent Tracking Protection is another common complaint among web developers.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#466

Post by MrStonedOne »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #463
fiddlerwoaroof wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isolation isn’t a benefit for extensions: the whole point of extensions, bookmarklets, etc. is to be able to modify arbitrary aspects of the browsing experience in arbitrary ways.

It's a balance, right? If browser extensions had kernel access, I think we'd all agree that's bad. Now, that's obviously an extreme, but where is the line? Up until recently†, I'm not aware of a situation where a popular Firefox extension was unable to work in Chrome due to Google restrictions. †I'm purposefully excluding the whole adblock thing, as that's super recent and thus not relevant here.

But it's not about the popular extensions.

Now there is no more middle click to submit on forms and I used that at my old job to speed up a bunch of tedious tasks.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#467

Post by nearbuy »

ethelward wrote: post #14
mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

> Chrome's appeal was primarily technical Among the tech crowd, probably. For the remaining 99.99% of users, absolutely not. Chrome's appeal came from the pervasive advertisement campaigns, from the bundling strategy with other pieces of software, for the pre-installation on new computers or from the ads on Google SEarch homepage.

I think Chrome's design appeal is obvious just from looking at a screenshot of Chrome and Firefox in 2008: https://imgur.com/a/uyBcxI0.

Firefox and Edge eventually adopted Chrome's design choices to have more content area, no "File, Edit, View" menu bar and an integrated search and address bar. But for years Chrome was ahead.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#468

Post by hnbroseph »

behringer wrote: post #150
leftyted wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chrome's main appeal was that it was much faster than firefox and IE. At everything. I had no technical knowledge when chrome came out, was using firefox, tried chrome, never looked back. It's not really possible to separate out the effects of advertising from the effects of the product actually being better. Maybe I installed chrome because I saw an ad, but I stopped using firefox because it was clear that chrome wa…

I've used firefox and never bothered with chrome as a daily driver. The speed issue is entirely marketing driven. Nobody cares about a few tenths of a second of load times until the ads were shoving stats down our throats that chrome was so much faster Firefox is and has always been perfectly adequate, except maybe for a few html5 canvas type apps.

back then, for me, there was a massive qualitative difference between chrome and the rest. i didn't have any particular preference, but chrome just was a far superior user experience.

Re: We Need Chrome No More

#469

Post by Unkechaug »

slivanes wrote: post #127
mapgrep wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this post, but I take issue with the idea that Chrome was initially adopted, or served, "to break the Web free from corporate greed." Chrome's appeal was primarily technical. Each tab got its own process and could crash without taking down the entire browser. No one else had this at the time, and it was a big deal because Flash was still widespread so sites were even less stable than they are today. Luckily…

For me, it was the unified bookmarks across all ones machines with Chrome. No more fiddling with copying bookmarks or syncing - it was done automatically and it worked. No other browser had it built in at the time.

Speed was nice, but this really hooked me. What really blew me away not long after was synced tabs between my computer and phone.
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